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Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.

Vladimir Nabokov

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Vladimir Nabokov
Age: 77 †
Born: 1899
Born: January 1
Died: 1977
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
Chess Composer
Chess Player
Journalist
Lepidopterist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
St. Petersburg
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Vladimir Sirin
Vl. Sirin
Wladimir Nabokoff-Sirin
V. Sirin
Ideas
Machine
Nuance
Block
Curve
Russia
Intervals
Machines
Blocks
Cutting
Stepped
Walled
Color
Curves
Outlawed
Coming
Solid
Grossly
Modern
Colors
Interval

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To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.
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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
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Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
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Above all, beware of platitudes, i.e., word combinations that have already appeared a thousand times.... As a general rule, try to find new combinations of words (not for the sake of their novelty, but because every person sees things in an individual way and must find his own words for them).
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It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moments our main, if not only, handle to reality.
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We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.
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As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration [for Lolita] was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.
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In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.
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Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.
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His wings were failing, but he refused to fall without a struggle.
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Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.
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And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.
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I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
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And the rest is rust and stardust.
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The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car.
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I have no ear for music. When I attend a concert, I endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in lacquered wood, a diligent bald spot over a fiddle, take over, and soon I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians.
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There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.
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And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this: O rainbow-colored gods. . .
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